


waiting out wildfires

by eleionomae



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-05-04 08:51:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14589414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleionomae/pseuds/eleionomae
Summary: The Bull is loud and coarse and he spends a lot of time at the Inquisition's diplomatic functions in a passive-aggressive snit. But it's hard to dislike someone who would—and does—throw himself directly between you and imminent danger at every opportunity.Or: five times the Bull saved the Inquisitor's life, and one time Lavellan returned the favor.(Prompt courtesy of snakes, who wanted "more actual bodyguarding" from the Iron Bull/Inquisitor dynamic.)





	waiting out wildfires

**Author's Note:**

> this is called 'waiting out wildfires' because snakes originally gave me this prompt while we were on lockdown at work all the way back in september, when the immediate area around our workplace was, like, literally on fire. recently it was also on fire again, which made me think of this, so i'm cleaning it up and posting this in installments. sorry bby╭( ･ㅂ･)و

“And this commission,” the baron is saying, indicating a ceiling-high pastoral scene done in countless flaming jewel tones, its gilt frame smouldering in the low light of the gallery, “was done at my father's request, just after Adeline of Churneau completed her apprenticeship. We've been foremost among her many patrons since then.”  
  
Lavellan stares at it a moment, but a strange detail averts his attention.  
  
“The frame is—”  
  
“—Oh, yes, I see His Worship has a keen eye. When the Cough struck, we were forced to flee to our estate in the Dales. There were... incidents.”  
  
Looters. Lavellan supposes the baron means for him to picture lawless peasants looking for easy plunder, their rough fingers scrabbling to tear down the soft pink damask curtains, ripping out the lionhead sconces in the walls for their priceless mother-of-pearl inlays, but he knows, from weeks spent in the Fereldan hinterlands, that it was more than likely opportunistic relatives. Wartime economies have a heavy bias for material goods and food that travels well. A golden frame twice as tall as the largest man in the room is worthless if it can't be traded immediately.  
  
Twice as tall as the second largest man in the room, he corrects himself. He doesn't break his focus, but he knows if he takes a discreet sidelong look he'd find the Bull where he left him, leaning against the wall near the door, being aggressively shirtless and equally aggressively friendly. Maybe someone would've been nice enough to finally offer him a drink. It takes Lavellan a sudden pulse of willpower to not laugh aloud at the unbidden mental image of one of those tiny, wafer-thin flutes being ferried around by the liveried servants in his massive palm.  
  
“...The frame cannot be removed without doing harm to the piece, you see, and so...”  
  
It's not the most boring conversation he's had all evening, but it's close.  
  
When the baron finally releases him from the tour, Lavellan desperately homes in on a refreshment platter and switches out his empty wineglass for a full one, surreptitiously taking a long drink.  
  
“You need me to mercy kill you, just give the sign,” the Bull rumbles a few paces behind him, his voice pitched low, but it doesn't matter much because it carries halfway across the gallery anyway.  
  
“You're too kind. I almost expired on the spot when the comtesse de Montfort tried to embarrass me in front of her husband by asking if I was enjoying the Serault white at dessert. But the joke's on her—I'm a lush with a good memory.”  
  
“That when they had that Towers stuff out?”  
  
It's unbelievably rude, but Lavellan looks directly at him, obviously surprised. Then, a moment later, he knows he shouldn't be: the Bull has had contracts with three quarters of Marchand's other dinner guests over the course of his career. Doubtless he'd have osmosed some of Orlais' arcane wine conventions.  
  
“Yes,” he replies, properly contrite. “It tasted like vinegar.”  
  
“Gotta offset all that sugar somehow.”  
  
Later, he'll think about this exchange with a distant kind of wonder.  
  
What happens is this: Lavellan's halfway to the guest room appointed to him by Marchand when he realizes that the heavy, slightly seasick feeling in his stomach isn't typical of a night after a light, leafy vegetable-based Orlesian summer dinner course. He makes it to his quarters, calmly kneels down onto the inhospitably cold marble flooring beside the bed, gropes around, and slides the chamber pot out from under the bedframe.  
  
_Oh_ , he thinks, _I've been poisoned._ Then, he vomits into it.  
  
He survives the first round, though it wrings his guts inside-out and the smooth porcelain of the chamber pot is now a smear of half-digested greens. If there's blood in it, he can't tell yet; his stomach cramps up in waves, threatening a round two in the very near future.  
  
An eternity later, someone raps at the door. Lavellan clamps his jaws shut and tries to will the surging bile down, barely daring to breathe. Anyone who went through the trouble of poisoning his wine won't have trusted an assumption that he'd drink and calmly lie down to die; there's a high probability it's an assassin disguised as a chambermaid on the other side of the threshold. The lamps have all been lit and Lavellan knows anyone passing through this wing can see the light filtering out into the significantly darker hallway; there's no mistaking that the room is occupied. Had he locked the door?  
  
A voice breaks the painful silence. "Boss?"  
  
Lavellan is relieved enough to let himself double over to vomit into the chamber pot again with impunity. When he lifts his head again, the room tilts, a strong pulse of vertigo washing over him, like falling out of a fade rift, or outrunning an avalanche. Like the dawning realization you may only have a few minutes left to live.  
  
The Bull calls for him again over the door. Lavellan draws his sleeve up and wipes a murky string of spit off his bottom lip, miserably weighing the merits of trying to get up to answer the door. His throat burns from the upswell of stomach acid; likely he couldn't navigate the challenge of trying to be loud enough to be heard but quiet enough to not snag outside attention even if he'd wanted to try.  
  
Luckily, the Bull isn't an idiot, and Lavellan catches the sound of what he has to assume is the qunari dropping his massive bulk to the floor to pick the lock, accomplishing it within an impressive thirty seconds—and somewhat deliriously, Lavellan wants to ask him how he manages, missing two whole fingers, when the door finally swings open and the Bull shoulders his way inside.  
  
"Crap," is all he says, bumping the door shut behind him and engaging the bolt. For a second Lavellan almost thinks to gesture towards the servants' access on the other side of the wall, but the Bull pre-empts him, sliding a chair away from the handsome lacquered writing desk in the corner of the room to wedge it beneath the doorknob, triple-timing it all the way.  
  
Lavellan vomits again in the meantime, his spit coming up with a pink tinge. The sight makes him feel even sicker. How much longer would he have all his faculties? The Bull's presence complicates things, but he runs through a quick and dirty list anyway: soluble in wine, so likely a powder. Organic. Not very corrosive. Subtle enough to not be out of place in an Orlesian kitchen. Felandaris? Too conspicuous. Deathroot? Not impossible, but he's had it enough in lyrium potions to be able to pick up on the aftertaste, and there had been no suggestion of that in anything he'd drunk tonight. He thinks of the Dales, the things that grow out of the hills and on the rocky banks of the Rush of Sighs, in the untended gardens of the Orlesian properties far to the northeast.  
  
"The wine?" the Bull ventures, bringing himself to one knee beside Lavellan. Even beneath a hazy film of exhaustion, Lavellan can see the movement troubles his bad leg.  
  
"Yes. Probably," Lavellan croaks out, syllable by syllable. "Rashvine nettle-based. Soured the wine."  
  
There's another uncomfortable, dissonant silence as the Bull works out what to do, his face impassive, just a little shadowy crimp in his gnarled gray forehead as he thinks. They've worked together long enough now that Lavellan has some sense of the rudiments of the Bull's decision-making processes, but he'd have bet all the money in his personal accounts that the Bull's stores of knowledge on poisons favor much stronger synthetic compounds.  
  
"Not dangerous in small amounts. Just unpleasant."  
  
"No offense, Boss, but you weigh like... _maybe_ one and a half Seras. One glass could do some permanent damage."  
  
There's no arguing with that. Lavellan bends his neck and tries to vomit a fourth time, but there's nothing left to wring out. The sound mortifies him.  
  
"You want me to ring for Josie?"  
  
As horrific as this is, Lavellan can't imagine doing this with Josephine present, too. Bad enough that the Bull is hovering, but he's not in any state to repel a more immediate follow-up assassination attempt, so he doesn't press for him to leave. More than that, he doesn't _want_ the Bull to leave.  
  
The cramping starts again, and Lavellan feels himself give an involuntary twitch that rapidly turns into a full-body convulsion. A muscle in his core contracts and then spasms free. The Bull's broad gray palms find his abdomen and his back, bracketing him in place.  
  
"Water," he coughs out.  
  
"Yeah," says the Bull, drawing away without any further elaboration. He doesn't bother with a glass, the whole pitcher on the nightstand obnoxiously small in his fist. It takes some doing, but Lavellan tips his head up and chokes down a mouthful when the Bull angles the rim of the pitcher against his lips, his eyes squeezing shut against another sudden wash of nausea.  
  
A mustard seed infusion would probably help. There's are a few chunks of fuel still burning in the hearth, and his leather herb packet lies where he'd left it before dinner, half-tumbled over the brocaded bedspread. It's not so difficult that Iron Bull couldn't do it with minimal instruction, but his eyelids are _so heavy_.  
  
"Hey." The Bull jabs him pertly with the pad of a finger, right into the soft space between his ribs. He sets the pitcher down a little less gently than he probably wanted, the porcelain giving an ominous _bong_ as it makes contact with the floor. "Stay awake, boss."  
  
It's too much effort to explain that if it was going to kill him, he'd have been dead by now—so he waves the Bull off with a gesture he's not really sure adequately gets the point across, shuddering reflexively again. In the building delirium, he feels none of his usual reluctance to look up into the Bull's face, realizing, a little belatedly, that his expression belies a strange sense of helplessness that Lavellan finds more unsettling than anything else about tonight.  
  
In his hindbrain, he wants to reassure him, and realizes a beat later that he doesn't know how. The Bull resists any and all attempts at comfort even on a good day. _Our contract has you in for the duration of the Inquisition, barring a catastrophic act of the Maker._   He'd only glanced at it when the final terms had been drawn up and committed to Josephine's archives, but he's fairly certain that phrase appears verbatim at least twice. It's a set-phrase at best, but this is the Inquisition; there's no accounting for a hole in the sky, or a resurrected ancient darkspawn knocking around southern Thedas. _Your stipend isn't going anywhere._  
  
The Bull's hand is on his spine, uncharacteristically circumspect. In that moment Lavellan understands that he's the kind of person who needs something to do in a crisis: someone for whom inactivity like this is unbearable. Despite himself, Lavellan slumps into the wide gray expanse of the Bull's naked chest, a metal hinge in his shoulder brace catching on his cheek, sharp and cold as lazurite against the unnatural heat in his face and neck.  
  
This isn't a normal element to their friendship, but he's tired and afraid, in spite of his own assurance this isn't going to be the work of more than three days of rest to clear out of his system. There's a brief, awkward pause, just long enough to make Lavellan feel like starting to plan out how to smooth this over later, when the Bull finally slides his free hand to the round of his shoulder, nudging Lavellan's face up to rest more comfortably against his clavicle. The skin beneath is tight and thick, brindled with scars. The sound of the string ensemble filtering up from Marchand's parlor has long died out: the mood in the room is suddenly perversely intimate, the room eerily quiet except for the sound of their breathing.  
  
Lavellan shivers again. It's not the poison this time.  
  
Time crawls by in an indistinct sequence, interrupted only when he feels the Bull's dominant arm tense ever so slightly.  
  
"I have to put you down," he says, so low that it vibrates down from his throat and into Lavellan's bones, and Lavellan wishes he could read his tone, but he's not even sure he's fully awake, so he goes to the floor without backtalk, rolling his burning eye sockets into the cool marble. There's a sound from somewhere in the vicinity of the fireplace. _Could be a rat falling through the vent_ , Lavellan thinks, but he knows even before the first human leg delicately touches down into the ashes of the fireplace, folding into itself until all its limbs are free of the duct, then unfolding into its full height. Even despite the smears of ash and dust from the roof and then from the trek down the vent, Lavellan recognizes the diamond-patterned tunic of a harlequin.  
  
She's lightly armed; there's only a dagger hanging from the bright red silk cord around her waist. No doubt she would have expected him to be, at worst, completely alone and incapacitated. But the Bull darts to her in three long strides, much faster than anyone expects from a qunari reaver, cracking the hard ridge of his forehead down into her solar plexus. There's enough of the Bull's physical power behind it that Lavellan knows that if the kinetic force didn't crush her ribs into splinters, her spine would have taken the kickback anyway. She drops to the floor, her mask still securely in place. It was painless.  
  
The Bull grumbles something about _Finally_ , and _stupid Orlais_ , and lightly toes at the slight form of the dead assassin, but Lavellan can tell his mood has improved; he watches him roll his shoulders before he tromps back to him on the floor, no longer radiating the energy of a caged bronto.  
  
It should say a lot about the increasingly insane tempo of his life that Lavellan feels more safe in that moment, alone in a room with a man who could snap his neck with just a strategic pinch of his thumb and index finger to his throat, a man he'd just watched murder someone in a ruthless display of force, than he can ever remember feeling before, but the Bull kneels down again, his hand gently finding the pulse in his jugular, and the thought leaves him. He is in no danger here. The man currently scooping him up to slump against his side is a vetted qunari assassin, no less lethal than the one lying dead on the other side of the apartment, and Lavellan wouldn't trade him for anything.  
  
"I have to close my eyes," he admits, thinking better of trying to tactfully thank someone for brutally dispatching a would-be killer just now. "Just move a pillow down here and send a note to Leliana later. I'll be fine."  
  
The Bull exhales hard through his nose, his grip on Lavellan shifting, but if he says anything after, Lavellan misses it: the collective light in the room flickers bright red behind his eyelids, and he knows he'll have to content himself with not knowing. The last thing to leave him is the smell of the perfume in the bed sheets behind them, and the chemical nimbus of the adrenaline working through the Bull's bloodstream, and then the world goes dark. It never occurs to him to be worried about what might happen after.

 


End file.
